Emotion plays a bigger part in public life than we often suppose. When the mass killer Anders Behring Breivik announced he detested a song he claimed had been used to brainwash the youth of Norway into supporting immigration, some 40,000 citizens gathered in the centre of Oslo to sing it in defiance. When a 30-year-old runner in the London marathon collapsed and died not far from the finishing line a shocked British public went onto the website where she had hoped to raise \u00a3500 for The Samaritans and began making donations which now total getting on for \u00a31m.<\/p>\n
But the donors who went onto Claire Squires\u2019 JustGiving page also wrote some odd things. She was brave, they said, and \u201can angel\u201d who had sacrificed her life for others. It is not to diminish the sadness of the Leicestershire hairdresser\u2019s death to say that such comments make no rational sense. It was not as though the poor woman had known that she might die and had decided to run anyway. But hyperbole is part of the language of bereavement, public as well as private. Strangers felt touched, at an unexpected depth, by the intimation that their own death could be as arbitrary \u2013 or as imminent. Their small donations assuaged the little grief that their moment of empathy had pricked.<\/p>\n
\u201cExtraordinary how potent cheap music is,\u201d Noel Coward has a character say in Private Lives<\/em>. \u00a0The song to which the killer Breivik objected had a jaunty little folk tune and the hit version in Norway was played on a preposterous ukele. But the two women who announced on Facebook that they were going to sing it, expecting a couple of dozen friends might join them, found that one per cent of the entire Norwegian population turned out. They sang in the rain, waving red and white roses, the colour of blood and bandages, \u201ctogether shall we live, every sister, brother, you and me, young children of the rainbow\u201d. But they were not singing for someone else. \u201cWe aren\u2019t here because of him, but because of each other,\u201d as one of them put it.<\/p>\n Breivik got to hear of it. He pronounced the collective singing \u201cillogical.\u201d\u00a0We have seen where his logic leads.\u00a0 On the website where the video of the mighty crowd\u2019s gentle song was posted nasty internet trolls added poisonous ultra-nationalist rhetoric in response. That showed how necessary it was for Norway\u2019s silent majority to break its silence. A song was a more effective response than any statement could have been.<\/p>\n Sentimentality is desiring the luxury of an emotion without paying for it, Oscar Wilde once said. Some say that there is a falseness about sentimentality, but it is more a superficiality, a transience or lack of proportion: Hitler wept watching a pair of lobsters boiled yet unblinkingly sent millions of people to their deaths. Emotion becomes sentiment when we look at others and then project their plight onto ourselves. It is why cheap tear-jerking movies work; it descends into the self-indulgent, the maudlin or the mawkish. It is selective. It dilutes intense feelings to a safe strength.<\/p>\n But there are thoughts that lie too deep for tears. With sentiment little really alters but emotion prompts change, so that something \u2013 however small \u2013 is never the same again. The donations to Claire Squires\u2019 web page are an intuitive ritual acknowledgement of that fact. But the determination of the people of Norway to stand up and be counted goes beyond the ritual into the political.<\/p>\n Feelings are a necessary precondition of rational thought and action, for without emotion to prick our moral sense, as the philosopher David Hume argued, reason would remain dormant. But it has to be emotion which empowers and not a narcissistic sentimentality which indulges. And that requires self-awareness. Noel Coward knew that. The cheap music he had his character overhear was a hit tune from years before, which Coward had written himself.<\/p>\n \n from The Independent on Sunday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Emotion plays a bigger part in public life than we often suppose. When the mass killer Anders Behring Breivik announced he detested a song he claimed had been used to brainwash the youth of Norway into supporting immigration, some 40,000 citizens gathered in the centre of Oslo to sing it in defiance. When a 30-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,38],"tags":[416,82,417,716],"class_list":["post-5220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-society","tag-bereavement","tag-community","tag-self-awareness","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5220"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8047,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220\/revisions\/8047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}